Abortion a winning issue for Davis

AUSTIN – As Wendy Davis prepares to announce her bid to be Texas’s next governor, Republicans can barely contain their glee. Attorney General Greg Abbott, their likely gubernatorial nominee, will get to match up against the woman conservative blogger Erick Erickson called “Abortion Barbie.” For Davis, the issue that made her famous is widely considered here to be the very one she will have to spend the entire campaign running from.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to this red-state rout: Abbott is the one trying to avoid talking about his position on abortion. By taking a position on abortion that is extreme even in Texas — he’s against exceptions for rape and incest and oddly obscure on the life of the mother — Abbott makes Davis look moderate in comparison and could give her an opening to court the white suburban women who hold the key to victory.

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Even in Republican strongholds, Republicans pay heavy prices for opposing rape exceptions for abortion. Last year, Republicans lost Senate seats in Indiana and in Missouri when their nominees parsed whether pregnancies from rape were “ something God intended” or, in the case of Todd Akin, even possible. Akin’s “legitimate rape” quip even drew a rebuke from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who said Akin was “off-base, insensitive and a distraction from the important issue of protecting life.”

Give Perry credit for knowing that rape can cause pregnancy and for clearly stating that he doesn’t support exceptions for rape and incest but supports one to save the mother’s life. His position makes for lousy policy, but at least he has the guts to say so in unambiguous terms.

We can’t say the same for Abbott, his heir apparent. There’s no question that Abbott opposes abortion rights. Less clear is what exactly that means. When asked what exceptions he supports, Abbott waffles.

“If you’re really pro-life, you want to save every life, but that also includes the mother’s life,” he said this summer. “The life of the mother is just as precious as the life of the child.”

So he supports an exception to save the mother’s life?

“In a way, but you’re in a way kind of mischaracterizing the word. It’s not like an exception,” he said, responding to a reporter’s question. “What both the medical community needs to do, and the pro-life community supports, is doing everything we can to protect the life of the mother.”

Got it? Me neither. Asked to explain, he again resorted to gobbledygook.

“It’s not a binary choice. You know I’m pro-life. … What pro-life really means, because this is really misconstrued quite frequently, pro-life really means you support the life of the child and the life of the mother. And you want to help both the child and the mother,” he said, which, in the context of outlawing specific health-care decisions, means exactly nothing.

Abbott’s abortion obfuscation shows how far out of mainstream opinion a candidate has to go to find safe harbor in a Republican primary, even as one as mildly contested as his is expected to be. But by tacking so far to the right, Abbott could alienate the mainstream suburban women who propelled Kay Bailey Hutchison, a pro- Roe Republican, to the U.S. Senate in 1994 — and whom Wendy Davis needs to win over if she’s going to get to the governor’s mansion.

In a June University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, 38.65 percent of moderates, 38.36 percent of suburbanites, and 29.31 percent of soft Republicans agreed with the position that abortion should be a legal and personal choice. Those are minority opinions, to be sure, but Democrats haven’t scored that high in the suburbs since Ann Richards was governor. Add to their numbers the suburban Texas women who support exceptions for rape and incest — and who might think twice about electing a governor who didn’t — and Davis could have an opening.

Proposing that white suburban women could be part of a Davis coalition gets me laughed at, but James Henson, the government professor behind the UT/TT poll, points out that white suburban women are already leaving the Republican Party. In 2010, half of white suburban women called themselves Republicans. In that June poll, only 38 percent did so. Slightly more (46 percent) called themselves Democrats, the first time this has happened in years.

“Suburban women who appear uncomfortable with the increasing power of far-right conservatives in the Texas GOP may be the place to start — they may be ready to be persuaded to make different choices come Election Day,” wrote Henson, who cautions, “The Democrats get a net gain from using recent abortion politics as a launching pad rather than a destination.”

Here’s the math: Texas Democrats typically get a quarter of the white vote, which in 2014 would translate to about 15 percent of the overall vote. Add to that another 25 percent of the vote from Hispanic and black voters, and Davis would expect to get about 40 percent of the vote come November. But if she can raise her share of the white vote to 40 percent, that would bring her up to around 50 percent — enough to win in a state without a runoff and where Libertarians and Green Party candidates siphon off a few points. And the biggest store of unrealized white votes for Davis is in suburbia, where women might be willing to give a Democrat a second look because of, and not in spite of, abortion.

Along with guns and gays, abortion has long been part of the Republican red-state arsenal. But as Texas Republicans abandon suburban women to court Tea Party voters, they create opportunities for Democrats whose abortion positions appear increasingly moderate. If Davis can frame Abbott’s extreme position as restricting abortion access, then Gov. Wendy Davis might not be such a crazy idea after all.

Jason Stanford is a national Democratic consultant who lives in Austin. He writes a nationally syndicated column and is a partner with the Truman National Security Project.